I say W2k3 rules for ever! All my "serious" envs are XP/W2k3 based. I have W2k3 VMs running on less than 80MB of RAM.The Win7 line (specially W2k8) is too much of a resource hog if you care about VM density per box.

Moved from Slackware (unRAID) to unRAID in ESXi with RAW device mapping (along with Plex and the downloading apps in a Ubuntu VM) to FlexRAID with RAW device mapping on Windows 2008, not a great upgrade path I would advise anyone, I assure you. No offense but Linux Slackware is *dead* and to be running Plex, SABnzb, Transmission, Couchpotato, Sickbeard, Spotweb, Crashplan etc, etc and of course file serving of 15 drives while keeping 3 servers up-to-date is a pain.So back to the drawing board: Windows server 2008 R2 bare metal it is. Great to have a real OS again, with direct hardware access and no more apt-get'ing, installpkg'ing or editing text files to getting anything done.

Now where was I..... ah yes installing Windows updates, time for another reboot...ARGH